Amazon Dash Controlled Motion Sensing Camera (Part 0)

To cut costs in my motion sensing camera project, I opted to use the built-in LEDs of the Raspberry Pi as status indicators. One problem with the RPi 3 is that the power LED could not be disabled...unless you directly modify the firmware. This is a problem for me since the red power LED is pretty bright and makes it difficult to see the activity LED which for some reason is orange when the power LED is also on. I also experienced some weird issue where toggling the activity LED would make both LEDs go a bit crazy...

This will turn off the power LED. At this point I called it a day, but before I came up with the motion sensing camera project I did have plans to turn the LED on/off at sunrise/sunset, basically so that the lights don't distract me at night. To control the power LED in the current state is simple: